Monday, March 15, 2010

I use rcov to make sure I have 100% test coverage on my rails projects. In earlier versions of rails I used the rails_rcov plugin to accomplish this task. Since rails 3 allows rake tasks to be imported by gems, I decided to write a gem with a rake task that reports on code coverage.

rails_code_qa

Currently rails_code_qa runs the unit, functional, and integration tests for a Rails 3 app. It generates 2 different coverage reports. Unit test coverage is calculated on models, helpers, and lib; functional test coverage is calculated on the controllers. Coverage is not calculated on integration tests. In my experience I have found this to be a good way to calculate coverage because it encourages you to write unit tests that cover your core code very well.

Install

All you need to do to install rails_code_qa in your rails 3 app is add the following line to your Gemfile.

gem "rails_code_qa"

Then update the bundle for the rails app with the following command.

bundle install

Bundler automatically pulls from rubygems.org and installs any dependencies (rcov) that rails_code_qa needs.

Future
I plan to add other code quality tools to this gem in the future. Likely candidates include flog, flay, and roodi. Feel free to leave a comment if you know of another code quality tool that you think I should include.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Last week I was pleased to discover that Heroku now supports the rails 3 beta. To use it you have to switch the application stack. The main Heroku stack (Argent Aspen) runs ruby 1.8.6 which does not work with Rails 3. Heroku enabled a new stack (Badious Bamboo) which runs either Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7 or MRI 1.9.1 which both support Rails 3.

To get your Rails 3 app running on Heroku you need switch to your stack by following the Heroku stacks documentation. After you have the correct stack set up you need to make sure you have all of your gems set up in your Gemfile. I ran into issues because I use SQLite during development and I didn't have the required pg gem set up in my Gemfile.

That is all there is to getting up and running. I tried out a few of the add-ons, none of them seemed to break my app, but they did not all work quite right. The New Relic add-on reported on deployments but it still has not registered a single request.

Update: Rails 3 beta2 breaks on heroku when the New Relic add-on is added.